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Chocolate Meringue
One quart milk and yolks of four eggs, made into custard. Three tablespoonfuls powdered chocolate, put into a cup of warm water. One tablespoonful of corn-starch. Sweeten to your taste and let all boil together. Then put it in a baking dish, and when done, cover with a meringue of the whites of eggs and white sugar. Put in the oven again to brown, a few minutes.--Mrs. B.
A stirred custard thickened with a little cornstarch, poured into a dish and finished under a meringue — the ancestor of chocolate cream pie filling. The original assumes you know how to keep eggs from scrambling; that is the whole job.
- The hinge: temper the yolksScald the milk, whisk a ladle of it into the yolks, then return everything to the pan. The tablespoon of cornstarch is what makes "let all boil together" possible at all — starch protects the yolk proteins — but the mixture still needs constant stirring and should only just reach a bubble.
- "Powdered chocolate"This most likely meant plain unsweetened chocolate, grated or scraped from a cake, though prepared cocoa powders were also on the market by the 1870s; the recipe does not say which. Three tablespoons of either works; unsweetened cocoa gives a leaner, more bitter result and wants a little more sugar.
- Sweeten to your tasteFor a quart of milk, start at 1/2 to 2/3 cup sugar in the custard. With unsweetened chocolate the low end tastes thin.
- Cornstarch measureOne tablespoon per quart is a light set — a pourable custard, not a sliceable pudding. If you want it to hold a spoon shape, two tablespoons is closer to modern practice.
- Oven temperatureThe custard has already been boiled on the stove, though the recipe's "when done" suggests it may have had some oven time before the meringue went on; the book gives no temperature. For the browning the instruction is only "a few minutes," so a hot oven -- around 400F for 5-8 minutes -- is closer to what is described than a longer stint at 350F.
- The meringueFour whites beaten to soft peaks with about 8 tablespoons sugar, added a spoonful at a time. Spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all the way round, which stops it shrinking away and weeping.
- Baking dishA 2-quart dish. Pour the hot custard in and top it while it is still warm -- meringue spread on cold custard is more likely to slide and leak.
- YieldA quart of milk plus meringue serves six to eight. Best the day it is made; meringue on custard goes beady overnight in the refrigerator.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered recipes from a wide circle of Virginia housewives, printed largely as they were submitted and signed with initials — hence "Mrs. B." The terseness is characteristic: these were notes passed between women who already knew how to make a boiled custard and needed only the proportions. Chocolate is generally said to have become more affordable in American households by mid-century, sold as pressed cakes to be grated rather than as the free-flowing cocoa powder that followed van Houten's hydraulic press for defatting, and it appears in this book as a flavoring for creams, custards and cakes rather than as a confection. Meringue-topped custards like this one sat in the same family as lemon and coconut puddings of the period, and the pastry-shelled version of exactly this filling is what later became chocolate cream pie.